Poetry matters, and it matters that poetry should be translated and move freely across the frontiers of time and space. These are the premises on which we edit and poets and translators from all over the world contribute to MPT. Poetry and the State sets out to prove a truth we hold to be self-evident: that poetry is necessary for a humane life. Some states encourage their poets, others ignore them, others imprison and murder them. We want to document - chiefly in translated poems, but also in statements and short essays - ...
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Poetry matters, and it matters that poetry should be translated and move freely across the frontiers of time and space. These are the premises on which we edit and poets and translators from all over the world contribute to MPT. Poetry and the State sets out to prove a truth we hold to be self-evident: that poetry is necessary for a humane life. Some states encourage their poets, others ignore them, others imprison and murder them. We want to document - chiefly in translated poems, but also in statements and short essays - the varying but never easy relationship between poetry and the state. The issue will not only contain 'political' poems, but a variety of lyric poem, which insisting on the value of individual experience, live in more or less uneasy dealings with the order and the ideology of the state. Does the state allow you the autonomy the poem demands? As always, contributions will be from the present and the past, from near and far.
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